ALSONA Consulting Ltd. ALSONA Consulting Ltd. Is a privately held company established by the two principals in 2000. These two ambitious leaders managed to combine since yearly days two passions: love to the fashionable clothes and the computers. While studying in the field of Software Engineering at one of the best Canadian Universities, these young individuals have been working part time as models for various fashion designers. Upon their graduation, the couple managed to produce the software that allows tailors to cut clothing pieces with the highest degree of efficiency even when working with the most complex and inspiring design of the outfit. Using the original networking opportunity from 20 years ago the company gradually penetrated into more traditional retail industry and currently provides and supports software that is both more generic and common in the business of retailing. The line of products includes POS (Point of Sale) software, Inventory controlling solutions, Supplier managing solutions and even variety of administrative tools such as personnel and finances management. The company enjoys a significant degree of financial stability as their business model allows to sell software packages to retailers and then enter a contract to support them. Presently ALSONA Consulting has, in addition to required HR, Administrative and Financial personnel, two major departments: Marketing – responsible for selling software packages and maintaining the relations with the clients and Software Development – responsible for developing, deploying and maintaining the offered products. The former department consists of 6 specialists and the later includes 58 talented IT professionals. The clientele of ALSONA Consulting varies significantly but mostly is rated by the size of a retailer and the profitability of the signed contract which in turn dictates the priority in terms of allocating resources to the client in question. While it always remains challenging to sign up a new retailer and deal with the required initial investment of effort, presently 90% of work load for the Software Department is about enhancing the existing solutions and normally is done based on the ALSONA’s time frame. According to the owners of ALSONA Consulting, the decision to embrace Agile methodology 7 years ago paved the path to success. Presently Software Development and Marketing departments are using Kanban board where the entire amount of work is represented. The board has provisions to consider priorities of clients and also allows to identify contesting tasks between the departments. Also, within the last two years, the significant adjustments were made to the company’s strategy as it needed to respond to apparently undying shift of the retail industry towards on-line based model. Utilizing its vast knowledge of the industry and the experience in software development the company has started to work on a large on-line only platform solution – they enjoyed successful initiation of this project and currently finalizing the planning phase. Unfortunately, the outbreak of COVID-19 virus presented the company with the challenge related to enduring the current reality of emergency measures imposed to the local authorities. Many retailers, including the customers of ALSONA Consulting, has started to respond quickly to the present reality by attempting quickly move their presently in-store operations to on-line. Most recently, ALSONA’s Marketing departments has been overwhelmed with the customers’ requests to adjust the existing solutions as quickly as possible in order to establish some on-line presence. The vast majority of customers intend to be involved with providing the requirements that would suit their specific need the best. Being concerned about a possibility of losing the existing business, ALSONA Consulting has made a decision to start developing the solutions that would allow their clients to establish on-line presence quickly using variety of different adjustment to the existing products offered. You, as the most experienced employee in terms of product development and one who originally was involved with Kanban utilization, has been put in charge of the newly established task force with the mandate of providing the directions in regards how to handle the transition in question. 

1) the list of items that contains relevant to the “Challenge” information. 

2) the “Solution” section which contains your justification for selecting one particular approach that would allow to manage the project work the best (Use 4 options studied in our course). Assure that your Solution is based on the information in #1 above and provide a specific set of actions that would allow you to implement the chosen Solution. 

3) the “Results” section which contains the description of specific Results that you hope to obtain if the “Solution” in #2 implemented correctly